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Hypermedia Online Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal


5.2.7 Archiving

Archiving is usually performed by libraries not by publishers. In fact, most publishers regard their responsibility as having ended once they have shipped each issue of a journal. Paper has its difficulties as an archiving medium (acid-decay, flammability, storage requirements) but they are familiar difficulties and techniques for dealing with them are well known.

The new digital media on which electronic publications are stored (both on servers and on user's own workstations) pose a range of challenging problems to librarians and archivists needing to store them for long periods. The Commission on Preservation and Access has devoted considerable resources to this problem. Some of the issues raised in their best-known report on the subject [Lesk, 1992] are:

On the plus side, digital media can

These characteristics will require all those involved in the scholarly journal ecology to rethink their role with respect to archiving.

One initiative that may point the way to a class of solutions to e-journal archiving is Electronic Collections Online (ECO) from OCLC. ECO has the following characteristics:

Mindful of ongoing concerns about future access, OCLC is also working to ensure that libraries will have access to their journals even if Electronic Collections Online is discontinued.



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© Andrew Treloar, 2001. * http://andrew.treloar.net/ * andrew.treloar@gmail.com